Home

The Music Producer
A Dying Breed?
The Essentials of being a Music Producer


I feel a great need to explain to people, especially the younger generation, about what it really means to be a music producer. If you decided one day to go out and purchase a sampler, a MIDI controller, and/or virtual instruments, you are not a music producer. You are what is going to be known from this moment on as a beat maker. I am not saying there is anything wrong with being a beat maker. Some people are excellent beat makers and they make music that people the whole world ‘round have come to know and love. However, these people, as talented as they may be, are NOT music producers.

I would like to take you through a small journey and take a look at the creation of three world class albums that had great production value. I have done research on the creation of these albums, and hopefully this information will help educate those who do not know what is involved in creating records about the process. I am aware that there are many more producers and albums out there that should be in this article. This article is not intended to try to push these three albums/producers as the greatest ever. They are merely examples that serve the purpose of this article greatly. It should also be noted that the art of producing an entire album is not as common as it used to be. Now, people are producing individual songs, or a collection of tracks that will form part of an album.

...

The Digital Audio Workstation: For Beginners

What is the best DAW for the beginner?

In order to decide what DAW is the best for you, as a beginner, you first need to fully understand what a Digital Audio Workstation does.

First: DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation. The key word here is: Digital. DAWs were originally created to find an alternative to recording with tape. DAWs are computer based, and play back digital audio tracks. In a simple nutshell: A DAW is a virtual studio residing inside of your computer.

You need to understand the differences between an actual Digital Audio Workstation, and a MIDI sequencing program. These two are often confused with one another. The most important key feature to any DAW that can separate them from MIDI sequencing softwares is it's ability to record audio. Some software, such as Propellerhead's Reason, have the strong ability to sequence music through MIDI, but don't have any capabilities to record actual audio. Simply put: You can use your MIDI keyboard to make beats, but you can't record vocals or live instruments.
...

Lost iLok? Broken iLok?

Has this ever happened to you? You're at work all day, and you can't wait to go home to work in your studio, but the moment you get home, you realize that something terrible has happened. Your iLok key is broken. Or even worse: You can't FIND your iLok key! This can be one of the most frustrating and frightening moments of any musician's life. Where the hell are my liscenses? Now you have a bare version of Pro Tools, and you can't use any of those sweet plugins you've spent an unimaginable amount of money on. Well folks, it's happened to me already, and let me tell you what you need to do to get everything squared away. Because of course, there is a solution to every problem.

...

Xpand 2
How can you possibly still not have this Virtual Instrument?

With the incredibly amount of expensive Virtual Instruments that are currently available in the market, one can easily become confused on where to spend their hard earned pay checks. Well fellow audio geeks, I have some good news for you! - There is high quality virtual instrument available for as cheap as it can possibly get. That's right folks, Xpand2 is absolutely free!

With a purchase of Pro Tools 8.0, Xpand2 comes included as a bonus gift to you from the people at Digidesign / Avid. It's like getting a toy in your happy meal, If the happy meal was a high powered Digital Audio Workstation and the toy was something you wouldn't let your kids place their greasy little fingers all over.

...

AudioNeeds.com Presents: "Marketing Yourself 101: Social Networks"

In a world where the internet is quickly becoming the world's most dominant force of advertising, artists, whether big or small, can not afford to miss out on utilizing it correctly. So I'm prepared to give you a run down on many of the things you need to do, and some of the internet tools that are a "must" in order to promote yourself effectively. So today, we will start with Social Networks.

Social Networks are large scale websites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. that are basically a massive community of people from all over the world. It's very important to set yourself up to be a part of these communities. You must no longer expect your fans to come to you, but you must go to where your fans are. Social networks help with this more than anything else.

...

THE START UP STUDIO

I have been asked this question numerous times: "What kind of gear do I need for my home studio?" So, I've decided to take some time and write a small article about what I think would be some great setups for a "start up" home studio.

First of all, understand that in the Audio world, most people are always confused from the start between what type of computer they should run their systems on, and what will work on their operating system, and what wont. You need to understand that it is important from the start to choose the system that works the best for you. It's really just a matter of preference. Some people will swear to you that PC is the way to go, and others are die hard Mac geeks. It's all a matter of preference.

...